Voice assistants, as we saw in the previous article, have now become part of our daily life. Voice recognition technology offers a new and more intuitive way to interact with smart devices such as watches, fitness bands or smart home devices.

Alexa, developed by Amazon on cloud infrastructure, is currently the most popular voice assistant. Thanks to Alexa you can interface with the products of the Echo line, your PC or mobile phone, and many devices for the home created in collaboration with different brands of technology and furniture.

The assistant is activated using the keyword “Alexa”, following which you must specify your command. for example, to know the time just ask: “Alexa, what time is it?” and the device will respond with the current time. All of this is possible thanks to the fact that, once a command is detected by the assistant, it is forwarded to an artificial intelligence residing in the Amazon cloud which will create an answer.

Thanks to the opportunity offered by Amazon to be able to store customized commands created by programmers, and thanks to the flexibility of the MBC module, it is easy to interface the Briki products with the voice assistant, making it possible to create, thanks to the Briki MBC, different types of IoT devices that use customized voice commands.

METECA, with its Briki® product line, aims to bring the advantages of the IoT to the world of industry, and being able to interface with Alexa and with all other voice assistants, allows Briki products to be a right choice for all those companies that want to create highly innovative products  based on voice control.

In this video here we show you how it is possible to create a smart device with the BRIKI ABC carrier board and the MBC module, capable of interacting with Alexa without any type of cable connection, but only through the native Wi-Fi interface of the board.

In this test ALEXA will be asked to switch on the RGB LED of the BRIKI board in various modes. For the occasion, a firmware was created by defining a set of 5 “devices” related to the RGB LED that will be controllable via Alexa: red, green, blue, LED and rainbow. Once the firmware has been loaded on the board, just ask Alexa to track down new devices that can be identified with the command: “Alexa, search for devices” or by the App provided by Amazon. At the end of the search it will be possible to use the new devices found immediately, and it will therefore be possible to change the color components of the RGB LED.

In the video example you can see the execution of the command “Alexa, can you create a rainbow?” which allows you to create a short play of lights that will change the color of the LED by reproducing the shades of a rainbow.

This is just a simple example of how BRIKI technology can be easily programmed to interact with Alexa or other voice control software. In this way, not only will smart home devices be controlled, but it will also be possible to adapt to the demands of large industry for the creation of products equipped with voice commands in any field.

For further information on the world of IoT, please contact Meteca here.